Hattix

…He’s probably trying to decieve you. Cardinal O’ Brien, Roman Catholic Archbishop in Scotland speaks of “Frankenstein” experiments and “hideous practices” over the Government’s hybrid embryo bill, seeking to provide a legal framework for research to go ahead. It’s quite easy, and Christians are long known for taking the easy way out, to instantly assume these mad scientists in their darkened labs making nightmarish abominations behind closed doors. Take it away, Mr. O’ Brien:

“He is promoting a bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.”

This is the deception the Christian agenda wants you to believe. It isn’t just deception, it’s bare-faced lies. They think you’re stupid.

The facts of the case, unfortunately for them, are rather simple even for the layman to understand. Scientists need a specific type of cell called a stem cell for research into cures and treatments for horrible diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, they also provide insights into cancer and numerous other ailments. Unfortunately for us, these medical researchers are limited in their supply of stem cells; Stem cells come from human embryos before they’ve actually become a foetus and are still just a mess of cells chugging away with no life of their own. This has drawn ethical fire in the past but has generally been allowed to proceed.

What the scientists want to do is create their own embryos, free from the ethical ground of having to destroy what could (but never would have) become a human foetus. They do this by taking an animal egg cell, any mammal will do, and inserting the nucleus from a human cell, perhaps a skin cell. The resulting cell is a human egg cell, but created from an animal egg cell wrapping. It’s no more a human-animal hybrid than someone wearing a wooly jumper is a hybrid of human and sheep.

This is the entire truth. The animal cell provides the ‘cell machinery’ (the wooly jumper) while the human nucleus provides the instructions of what to do and gives the cell its identity. This cell will then proceed to develop as any other egg cell would and produce stem cells which the researchers can then harvest and use to progress in their understanding of various horrible diseases. These cells would never be brought “to term” or implanted in a mother. Even if they were, it would essentially be human cloning (which is banned) and the resulting child would be entirely human, not some deformed monstrosity. Scientists have no interest in cloning humans, they just want the pre-embryonic stem cells.

It is this research into Parkinson’s Disease, into Alzheimers Disease, into cancer that the Christians hate so much. If people aren’t dying and suffering, why would they turn to their God?

It brings me no joy at all and a great deal of sadness to learn that Arthur C. Clarke, the most noted science fiction author since Asimov, passed away yesterday. Born in 1917, his highest moment of fame was writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, but his legacy is much, much greater than a few literary works.

Clarke first described the geosynchronous orbit[1], where weather and communications satellites exist today. He wrote numerous factual books (including the very popular Snows of Olympus) and, indeed, most of his fiction did not stray outside the bounds of science. He had no warp engines, no teleporters, no ultra beam weapons, just physics and astronomy. He inspired two generations of rocket scientists, aerospace engineers, astronomers and physicists.

He was not just an author. He was an acclaimed futurist and inventor and a very influential one. The Apollo 13 Lunar Module was named “Odyssey” after his best known work, he is often quoted saying “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and is acknowledged as a major influence to Gene Roddenberry’s creation of Star Trek.

His tales of lunar colonisation and journeys through space never once cross the boundaries to fantasy but remain, to this day, engaging, realistic and very well written.

Spend a few minutes on Google exploring this giant of a man and the legacy he leaves. For a personal story, check Phil’s obituary at his Bad Astronomy Blog.

[1] While the idea was being tossed around Bell Labs also, Clarke described and notarised it so well that his writing was used to demonstrate prior art and deny a patent application.

I haven’t posted much lately, it’s purely laziness, so here’s a few stories that have caught my eye over the last few days.

BBFC defeated in Manhunt2 release. Morality, especially someone else’s morality, should not be law. The BBFC took a bloody nose in this one, its own regulation didn’t support its position and a government report due later this month supports removing the BBFC as the dominant authority on video game rating.

Glaciers receding faster than ever before. The base rate from 1990 to 1999 was 30cm/year, which is now increased to 150cm/year and still increasing. One glacier in Greenland lost 290cm in 2007, another in Norway lost 310cm in 2006. The number of worldwide glaciers which are actually getting bigger is now in single digits.

BBC’s iPlayer for mobile devices was “hacked” by nothing more complex than pasting the completely unprotected URL into a web browser. While offering unencumbered downloads is to be applauded, it wasn’t the intention here as the BBC don’t have permission or right to offer programming for more than 5 days after air.

Muslim ultra-conservatives win elections in Iran. Because everyone else was banned from running for not being Muslim-conservative enough. I shit you not.

It’s no secret that Americans are fiercely nationalist and not very patriotic. Nationalism is, of course, rallying behind what the government stands for while patriotism is rallying behind  what the country stands for, so we see Americans trying to overturn their Constitution and other anti-American things in the name of nationalism, things such as teaching religion in schools and curtailing freedoms, all anti-patriotic activities.

Britain may be starting down the very same slippery slope. Former attorney general Lord Goldsmith has been tasked with a review of citizenship (why is this even necessary?) and among his suggestions is a requirement for schoolkids to swear allegiance to the Crown and country. Not a requirement so much, but an “option” where no doubt peer pressure will do the rest, like it does in the US.

It’s an affront to everything Britain is. I’m having a hard time putting it in words just how anti-British such a scheme would be. A fat American tourist with a burger in one hand, cheap camera around his neck and a Texas vest complaining loudly that the bus didn’t go where he wanted it to go is more British than a scheme to have schoolkids swear allegiance. The very core British values that, presumably, Lord Goldsmith has been tasked with investigating are exactly the values under threat from such a hare-brained idea.

 We already have these ‘citizenship ceremonies’ for immigrants, those not born into British citizenship. They’re exactly what they pretend to be, a ceremonial ‘welcome to Britain, our values are now your values, our laws are now your laws, our freedoms are now your freedoms’ and I’d fully expect to swear the same regardless of which country I was immigrating into.

What I should not expect, and indeed must not, is to place that same oath on people who are already British. For proud Britons who love their country, their freedom and their democracy, the mere thought of requiring British citizens to degrade themselves (of course the implication will be that you’re not really British until you’ve done the ceremony) and their children in some parade to mock everything that Britain is, it’s just offensive.

The Scots have already dismissed it, but that’s to be expected from them, they never did like London. Teaching unions have poured scorn on it and republicans* are up in arms.

 *No, not members of the backwards anti-democracy Christian fundamentalist political party in the US. People wanting to proclaim Britain as a republic and to end the monarchy.

I felt it. Up late, room lit by a small four-watt flourescent tube and the slightly more powerful TFT monitor when a few tremors rolled me in my seat a little. I knew what it was instantly, I felt the Dudley quake of 2002 and it was exactly the same. The gentle rolling lasted maybe five seconds before a rapid series of sharp jolts took over; That’s when I realised this was somewhat stronger to say the least! Things fell. Shelving toppled. Neighbours went outside to see what was going on, to be told by me that it was just an earthquake.

An earthquake strong enough to be felt at any one specific place happens every five to ten years in the UK, whereas one strong enough to be felt at all at any place in the UK happens around twice a year. These are typically fairly weak events, maybe magnitude two or three. The widely felt Dudley earthquake of 2002 was a 4.7 and enough to be felt across the whole of England and Wales; It hit South Yorkshire, where I am, at about 3.0.

The Market Rasen earthquake of 2008 was a 5.2 at its epicenter (just 50km away) and still a good 5.0 when it reached me. Each integral, each one point, on the Richter scale is an energy difference of over thirty times. The 9.3 in Sumatra, 2006, yielding the deadly Asian Tsunami of Boxing Day, was over a million times more powerful.

But why do we get ‘quakes at all in the UK? We’re not on a faultline, we’re not anywhere near any volcanoes. Britain should be seismically dead, right? The reality isn’t quite so clear cut. Britain is on the move, but upwards, still rising back up after the ice melted only ten thousand years ago, two kilometers thick of ice depressed the land. We’re also being pushed east by the Atlantic seafloor spreading.

These forces, though gradual, build up. Britain’s geology, the rock that makes up the British Isles, is a mess. Old oceanic basalts from half a billion years ago, shales from the Jurassic, sandstones from the Cretaceous, coals from the Carboniferous, we’ve more geologic diversity beneath our feet than almost anywhere on Earth. All these rocks are bent, twisted by the incalculable forces of millions of years of tension, torsion and shifting. The rocks themselves are broken and faulted.

The current forces from our interglacial rebound and the mid-Atlantic ridge get caught up when our broken rocks snag on each other. Every few months, the rock breaks and the pressure is released; We get an earthquake. They’re usually small but every so often, maybe every five or ten years, we get one able to pass magnitude four.

Further reading on the British Geological Survey’s website, as well as realtime seismometer data.